Bounces

When young athletes daydream, they imagine becoming a pro, an all-star, a Hall of Famer. They do not dream of being a water boy or a ball girl. But, as an intermediate step, those aren’t bad. Roger Federer was a ball boy. So was Kramer, from “Seinfeld,” until he ran into Monica Seles and got fired. At the U.S. Open, where Kramer worked, the job pays an hourly wage, plus a free outfit, unlimited Gatorade, and the chance to hold Federer’s sweaty towel.

When ball boys were introduced at Wimbledon, in the twenties, they came from a nearby orphanage. Today, ball people, as they’re known, go through rigorous testing. Earlier this summer, Tina Taps, the Open’s director of ball people, was walking around the National Tennis Center, in Queens, examining potential recruits. Nearly five hundred boys, girls, men, and women had come for the first of several rounds of tryouts. Many were in tennis attire, but this was not necessarily a positive sign. “There should never be an assumption that because you play tennis you can be a ball person,” Taps said. Many tennis players, she noted, can’t throw. She prefers shortstops.

The tryout was a chance to assess specific skills—the ability to catch bouncing balls on the run, the ability to stand perfectly still at all other times—none in higher demand than a good arm. The Open is the only grand slam that has its ball people hurl balls through the air. (At Wimbledon, and at the French Open and the Australian Open, they roll the balls, like bowlers.) “This is America,” Taps said, explaining why the Open requires throwing. She added that Americans, versed in the mechanics of baseball, are better prepared to make an overhand toss. At the tryouts, this was not always the case. Taps watched a young girl throw a ball into a crowd outside Court 11, which reminded her of a ball boy who once hit a chair umpire in the head. The umpire’s glasses broke, and cut her face.

Balls flew in every direction, with many of the applicants unable to throw as far as the net. “If they can’t make the throw, get ’em out of there,” one of the instructors said. Ryan McIntosh, a twenty-three-year-old soldier from Rifle, Colorado, had no trouble throwing. He had no trouble with the required sprints, either, even though one of his legs had been lost to a land mine in Afghanistan and replaced with a prosthetic. Jerry Loughran, a veteran ball person, credited his throwing ability to twenty years of recreational softball. Among ball people, the median age is seventeen; Loughran, a retired labor lawyer, is sixty-four. Between matches, he sits with ice packs on each knee. “The first year, I came out of this thing really spent,” he said. “The second year, there were a bunch of older women in the stands yelling my name. I had groupies . . . older groupies.”

Loughran says that the life of a ball person is far from glamorous. “There’s this hellhole of a locker room with all these kids who haven’t been introduced to hygiene,” he said. “I don’t go there.” During matches, they fetch water bottles, hold umbrellas, and deal with sweat-, snot-, and blood-soaked towels. If a ball goes off the court, they hop the fence to find it, and must be sure to grab the right one: men’s balls are made of different felt and are slower than women’s. The only glamour positions, given to the élite ball people, are six spots each night in Arthur Ashe Stadium, which has the most television cameras. “When they go out there, they don’t say, ‘I’ve got this end,’ ” Loughran said. “They’ll actually say, ‘I’ve got Camera One.’ ” As the tournament drags on, lesser matches on outer courts can get dull, so Taps tries to keep the ball people engaged. “We might do an all-John crew,” she said. “An all-blond crew. Another funny one is Ng and Ng and Ng and Ng and Ng and Ng. We’ve had a lot of Ngs.”

Taps eventually selected sixty-five new ball people, including McIntosh, the soldier, but no new Ngs. Loughran was not yet sure if he would return. (He eventually did.) “I noticed the first day of the tournament is when the ninety-day period for notifying Medicare of my eligibility kicks in,” he said. He assessed possible replacements. “Both of them couldn’t make their throws on one hop,” he said, referring to two teen-agers on Court 9. “That’s a bit short. Two bounces there.” One of them, a lanky kid with floppy black hair, sent his next ball cross-court on a single bounce. “Now, that’s a much better throw,” Loughran said. “I’d give him a callback.” ♦